Part 4 (2/2)

”You were a faithful wife to me,” he says, ”and an obedient one: you were kind and gracious, sociable and friendly: you were a.s.siduous at your spinning (lanificia): you followed the religious rites of your family and your state, and admitted no foreign cults or degraded magic (superst.i.tio): you did not dress conspicuously, nor seek to make a display in your household arrangements. Your duty to our whole household was exemplary: you tended my mother as carefully as if she had been your own. You had innumerable other excellences, in common with all other worthy matrons, but these I have mentioned were peculiarly yours.”

No one can study this inscription without becoming convinced that it tells an unvarnished tale of truth--that here was really a rare and precious woman; a Roman matron of the very best type, practical, judicious, courageous, simple in her habits and courteous to all her guests. And we feel that there is one human being, and one only, of whom she is always thinking, to whom she has given her whole heart--the husband whose words and deeds show that he was wholly worthy of her.

CHAPTER VI

THE EDUCATION OF THE UPPER CLa.s.sES

From what has been said in preceding chapters of the duties and the habits of the two sections of the upper stratum of society, it will readily be inferred that the kind of education called for was one mainly of character. In these men, whether for the work of business or of government, what was wanted was the will to do well and justly, and the instinctive hatred of all evil and unjust dealing. Such an education of the will and character is supplied (whatever be its shortcomings in other ways) by our English public school education, for men whose work in life is in many ways singularly like that of the Roman upper cla.s.ses. Such an education, too, was outlined by Aristotle for the men of his ideal state; and Mr. Newman's picture of the probable results of it is so suggestive of what was really needed at Rome that I may quote it here.[247]

”As its outcome at the age of twenty-one we may imagine a bronzed and hardy youth, healthy in body and mind, able to bear hunger and hard physical labour ... not untouched by studies which awake in men the interest of civilised beings, and prepare them for the right use of leisure in future years, and though burdened with little knowledge, possessed of an educated sense of beauty, and an ingrained love of what is n.o.ble and hatred of all that is the reverse. He would be more cultivated and human than the best type of young Spartan, more physically vigorous and reverential, though less intellectually developed, than the best type of young Athenian--a nascent soldier and servant of the state, not, like most young Athenians of ability, a nascent orator. And as he would be only half way through his education at an age when many Greeks had finished theirs, he would be more conscious of his own immaturity. We feel at once how different he would be from the clever lads who swarmed at Athens, youths with an infinite capacity for picking holes, and capable of saying something plausible on every subject under the sun.”

If we note, with Mr. Newman, that Aristotle here makes if anything too little of intellectual training (as indeed may also be said of our own public schools), and add to his picture something more of that knowledge which, when united with an honest will and healthy body, will almost infallibly produce a sound judgment, we shall have a type of character eminently fitted to share in the duties and the trials of the government of such empires as the Roman and the British. But at Rome, in the age of Cicero, such a type of character was rare indeed; and though this was due to various causes, some of which have been already noticed,--the building up of a Roman empire before the Romans were ripe to appreciate the duties of an imperial state, and the sudden incoming of wealth in an age when the idea of its productive use was almost unknown,--yet it will occur to every reader that there must have been also something wrong in the upbringing of the youth of the upper cla.s.ses to account for the rarity of really sound character, for the frequent absence of what we should call the sense of duty, public and private. I propose in this chapter to deal with the question of Roman education just so far as to show where in Cicero's time it was chiefly defective. It is a subject that has been very completely worked out, and an excellent summary of the results will be found in the little volume on Roman education written by the late Professor A.S. Wilkins, just before his lamented death: but he was describing its methods without special reference to its defects, and it is these defects on which I wish more particularly to dwell.[248]

Let us notice, in the first place, how little is said in the literature of the time, including biographies, of that period of life which is now so full of interest to readers of memoirs, so full of interest to ourselves as we look back to it in advancing years. It may be that we now exaggerate the importance of childhood, but it is equally certain that the Romans undervalued the importance of it. It may be that we over-estimate the value of our public-school life, but it is certain that the Romans had no such school life to be proud of.

Biography was at this time a favourite form of literature, and some of the memoirs then written were available for use by later writers, such as Valerius Maximus, Suetonius, and Plutarch; yet it is curious how little has come down to us of the childhood or boyhood of the great men of the time. Plutarch indeed was deeply interested in education, including that of childhood, and we can hardly doubt that he would have used in his Roman Lives any information that came in his way. He does tell us something, for which we are eternally indebted to him, of old Cato's method of educating his son,[249] and something too, in his _Life of Aemilius Paullus_,[250] of the education of the eldest son of that family, the great Scipio Aemilia.n.u.s. But in each of these Lives we shall find that this information is used rather to bring out the character of the father than to ill.u.s.trate the upbringing of the son; and as a rule the Lives begin with the parentage of the hero, and then pa.s.s on at once to his early manhood.

The Life of the younger Cato, however, is an exception to the rule, which we must ascribe to the attraction which all historians and philosophers felt to this singular character. Plutarch knew the naiue and character of Cato's paedagogus, Sarpedon,[251] and tells us that he was an obedient child, but would ask for the reason of everything, in those questions beginning with ”why” which are often embarra.s.sing to the teacher. Two stories in the second and third chapters of this Life are also found in that insipid medley of fact and fable drawn up in the reign of Tiberius, by Valerius Maximus, for educational purposes;[252] a third, which is peculiarly significant, and seems to bear the stamp of truth, is only to be found in Plutarch. I give it here in full:

”On another occasion, when a kinsman on his birthday invited some boys to supper and Cato with them, in order to pa.s.s the time they played in a part of the house by themselves, younger and older together: and the game consisted of accusations and trials, and the arresting of those who were convicted. Now one of the boys convicted, who was of a handsome presence, being dragged off by an older boy to a chamber and shut up, called on Cato for aid. Cato seeing what was going on came to the door, and pus.h.i.+ng through those who were posted in front of it to prevent him, took the boy out; and went off home with him in a pa.s.sion, accompanied by other boys.”

This is a unique picture of the ways and games of boys in the last century of the Republic. Like the children of all times, they play at that in which they see their fathers most active and interested; and this particular game must have been played in the miserable years of the civil wars and the proscriptions, as Cato was born in 95 B.C.

Whether the part played by Cato in the story be true or not, the lesson for us is the same, and we shall find it entirely confirmed in the course of this chapter. The main object of education was the mastery of the art of oratory, and the chief practical use of that art was to enable a man to gain a reputation as an advocate in the criminal courts.[253]

Cicero had one boy, and for several years two, to look after, one his own son Marcus, born in 65 B.C., and the other Quintus, the son of his brother, a year older. Of these boys, until they took the toga virilis, he says hardly anything in his letters to Atticus, though Atticus was the uncle of the elder boy. Only when his brother Quintus was with Caesar in Gaul do we really begin to hear anything about them, and even then more than once, after a brief mention of the young Quintus, he goes off at once to tell his brother about the progress of the villas that are being built for him. But it is clear that the father wished to know about the boy as well as about the villas;[254]

and in one letter we find Cicero telling Quintus that he wishes to teach his boy himself, as he has been teaching his own son. ”I'll do wonders with him if I can get him to myself when I am at leisure, for at Rome there is not time to breathe (nam Romae respirandi non est locus).”[255] It is clear that the boys, who were only eleven and twelve in this year 54, were being educated at home, and as clear too that Cicero, who was just then very much occupied in the courts, had no time to attend to them himself. Young Quintus, we hear, gets on well with his rhetoric master; Cicero does not wholly approve the style in which he is being taught, and thinks he may be able to teach him his own more learned style, though the boy himself seems to prefer the declamatory method of the teacher.[256] The last entry in these letters to the absent father is curious:[257] ”I love your Cicero as he deserves and as I ought. But I am letting him leave me, because I don't want to keep him from his masters, and because his mother is going away,--and without her I am nervous about his greediness!” Up to this point he has written in the warmest terms of the boy, but here, as so often in Cicero's letters about other people, disapprobation is barely hinted in order not to hurt the feelings of his correspondent.

The one thing that is really pleasing in these allusions is the genuine desire of both parents that their boys shall be of good disposition and well educated. But of real training or of home discipline we unluckily get no hint. We must go elsewhere for what little we know about the training of children. Let us now turn to this for a while, remembering that it means parental example and the discipline of the body as well as the acquisition of elementary knowledge. Unfortunately, no book has survived from that age in which the education of children was treated of. Varro wrote such a book, but we know of it little more than its name, _Catus, sive de liberis educandis_.[258] In the fourth book of his _de Republica_ Cicero seems to have dealt with ”disciplina puerilis,” but from the few fragments that survive there is little to be learnt, and we may be pretty sure that Cicero could not write of this with much knowledge or experience.

The most famous pa.s.sage is that in which he quotes Polybius as blaming the Romans for neglecting it;[259] certainly, he adds, they never wished that the State should regulate the education of children, or that it should be all on one model; the Greeks took much unnecessary trouble about it. The Greeks of his own time whom Cicero knew did not inspire him with any exalted idea of the results of Greek education; but we should like to know whether in this book of his work on the State he did not express some feeling that on the children themselves, and therefore on their training, the fortunes of the State depend.

Such had been the feeling of the old Romans, though their State laid down no laws for education, but trusted to the force of tradition and custom. Old Cato believed himself to be acting like an old Roman when he looked after the was.h.i.+ng and dressing of his baby, and guided the child with personal care as he grew up, writing books for his use in large letters with his own hand.[260] But since Cato's day the idea of the State had lost strength; and this had an unfortunate effect on education, as on married life. The one hope of the age, the Stoic philosophy, was concerned with those who had attained to reason, i.e.

to those who had reached their fourteenth year; in the Stoic view the child was indeed potentially reasonable, and thus a subject of interest, but in the Stoic ethics education does not take a very prominent place.[261] We are driven to the conclusion that a real interest in education as distinct from the acquisition of knowledge was as much wanting at Rome in Cicero's day as it has been till lately in England; and that it was not again awakened until Christianity had made the children sacred, not only because the Master so spoke of them, but because they were inheritors of eternal life.

Yet there had once been a Roman home education admirably suited to bring up a race of hardy and dutiful men and women. It was an education in the family virtues, thereafter to be turned to account in the service of the State. The mother nursed her own children and tended them in their earliest years. Then followed an education which we may call one in bodily activity, in demeanour, in religion, and in duty to the State. It is true that we have hardly any evidence of this but tradition; but when Varro, in one of the precious fragments of his book on education, describes his own bringing up in his Sabine home at Reate, we may be fairly sure that it adequately represents that of the old Roman farmer.[262] He tells us that he had a single tunic and toga, was seldom allowed a bath, and was made to learn to ride bareback--which reminds us of the life of the young Boer of the Transvaal before the late war. In another fragment he also tells us that both boys and girls used to wait on their parents at table.[263]

Cato the elder, in a fragment preserved by Festus,[264] says that he was brought up from his earliest years to be frugal, hardy, and industrious, and worked steadily on the farm (in the Sabine country), in a stony region where he had to dig and plant the flinty soil. The tradition of such a healthy rearing remained in the memory of the Romans, and a.s.sociated itself with the Sabines of central Italy, the type of men who could be called _frugi_:

rusticorum mascula militum proles, Sabellis docta ligonibus versare glebas et severae matris ad arbitrium recisos portare fustis.[265]

It was an education also in demeanour, and especially in obedience[266] and modesty. In that chapter of Plutarch's _Life of Cato_ which has been already quoted, after describing how the father taught his boy to ride, to box, to swim, and so on, he goes on, ”And he was as careful not to utter an indecent word before his son, as he would have been in the presence of the Vestal Virgins.” The _pudor_ of childhood was always esteemed at Rome: ”adolescens pudentissimus” is the highest praise that can be given even to a grown youth;[267] and there are signs that a feeling survived of a certain sacredness of childhood, which Juvenal reflects in his famous words, ”Maxima debetur puero reverentia.” The origin of this feeling is probably to be found in the fact that both boys and girls were in ancient times brought up to help in performing the religious duties of the household, as camilli and camillae (acolytes); and this is perhaps the reason why they wore, throughout Roman history, the toga praetexta with the purple stripe, like magistrates and sacrificing priests.[268] It is hardly necessary to say that this religious side of education was an education in the practice of cult, and not in any kind of creed or ideas about the G.o.ds; but so far as it went its influence was good, as instilling the habit of reverence and the sense of duty from a very early age. Though the Romans of Cicero's time had lost their old conviction of the necessity of propitiating the G.o.ds of the State, it is probable that the tradition of family wors.h.i.+p still survived in the majority of households.

Again, we may be sure that the idea of duty to the State was not omitted in this old-fas.h.i.+oned education. Cato wrote histories for his son in large letters, ”so that without stirring out of the house, he might gain a knowledge of the ill.u.s.trious actions of the ancient Romans, and of the customs of his country”: but it is significant that in the next two or three generations the writers of annals took to glorifying--and falsifying--the achievements of members of their own families, rather than those of the State as a whole. Boys learnt the XII Tables by heart, and Cicero tells us that he did this in his own boyhood, though the practice had since then been dropped.[269] That ancient code of law would have acted, we may imagine, as a kind of catechism of the rules laid down by the State for the conduct of its citizens, and as a reminder that though the State had outgrown the rough legal clothing of its infancy, it had from the very beginning undertaken the duty of regulating the conduct of its citizens in their relations with each other. Again, when a great Roman died, it is said to have been the practice for parents to take their boys to hear the funeral oration in praise of one who had done great service to the State.[270]

All this was admirable, and if Rome had not become a great imperial state, and if some super-structure of the humanities could have been added in a natural process of development, it might have continued for ages as an invaluable educational basis. But the conditions under which alone it could flourish had long ceased to be. It is obvious that it depended entirely on the presence of the parents and their interest in the children; as regards the boys it depended chiefly on the father. Now ever since the Roman dominion was extended beyond sea, i.e. ever since the first two Punic wars, the father of a family must often have been away from home for long periods; he might have to serve in foreign wars for years together, and in numberless cases never saw Italy again. Even if he remained in Rome, the ever increasing business of the State would occupy him far more than was compatible with a constant personal care for his children. The conscientious Roman father of the last two centuries B.C. must have felt even more keenly than English parents in India the sorrow of parting from their children at an age when they are most in need of parental care. We have to remember that in Cicero's day letter-writing had only recently become possible on an extended scale through the increasing business of the publicani in the provinces (see above, p.

74); the Roman father in Spain or Asia seldom heard of what his wife and children were doing, and the inevitable result was that he began to cease to care. In fact more and more came to depend on the mothers, as with our own hard-working professional cla.s.ses; and we have seen reason to believe that in the last age of the Republic the average mother was not too often a conscientious or dutiful woman. The constant liability to divorce would naturally diminish her interest in her children, for after separation she had no part or lot in them. And this no doubt is one reason why at this particular period we hear so little of the life of children. There is indeed no reason to suppose that they themselves were unhappy; they had plenty of games, which were so familiar that the poets often allude to them--hoops, tops, dolls, blind man's buff, and the favourite games of ”nuts” and ”king.”[271] But the real question is not whether they could enjoy their young life, but whether they were learning to use their bodies and minds to good purpose.

When a boy was about seven years old, the question would arise in most families whether he should remain at home or go to an elementary school.[272] No doubt it was usually decided by the means at the command of the parents. A wealthy father might see his son through his whole education at home by providing a tutor (paedagogus), and more advanced teachers as they were needed. Cato indeed, as we have seen, found time to do much of the work himself, but he also had a slave who taught his own and other children. Aemilius Paullus had several teachers in his house for this purpose, under his own superintendence.[273] Cicero too, as we have seen, seems to have educated his son at home, though he himself is said to have attended a school. But we may suppose that the ordinary boy of the upper cla.s.ses went to school, under the care of a paedagogus, after the Greek fas.h.i.+on, rising before daylight, and submitting to severe discipline, which, together with the absolute necessity for a free Roman of attaining a certain level of acquirement, effectually compelled him to learn to read, write, and cipher.[274] This elementary work must have been done well; we hear little or nothing of gross ignorance or neglected education.

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